ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, the post-Yugoslav wars and their aftermath became the poignant staple of daily news in the press and on television. Following World War II, the widespread hope was that military conflicts should never again take place in Europe. All in vain. The end of the Cold War, brought about by the fall of communism and the breakups of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union, opened a space for playing out substate rivalries, led by ethnonational entrepreneurs who readily seized the opportunity (cf. Bieber 2011: 170). Meanwhile, the sole remaining superpower of the United States and the rapidly imploding former superpower of the Soviet Union diminished to a Russian Federation stayed away and looked on until the situation became too bad to turn a blind eye. But then it was too late. Federal Yugoslavia was the sole European leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, and, when successful, this state thrived as a genuine bridge between East and West (cf. Mates 1989; Savić 1979). But the country internally destabilized and postcommunist Europe in flux, no powers had any interest in helping to keep Yugoslavia together (especially, given the fact that resurgent Serbia under Slobodan Milošević’s leadership wanted to transform this multiethnic country into a homogenous greater Serbian nation-state). This federal polity split along the republican borders that were ethnolinguistically and ethnoreligiously defined in a broad manner, with the exception of Bosnia that suffered the most devastating war of all the wars of post-Yugoslav succession, a simultaneous war of partition and of ethnic cleansing (cf. Trbovich 2008; Waldenberg 2005). The sought-for elusive ideal of ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious homogeneity (cf. Altermatt 1996) triggered mass deportations and genocidal massacres that in 1991–1992 (Burns 1992; Safire 1993) introduced the English-language term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to the regular lexicon of news, international relations, and law (cf. Carmichael 2002; Mojzes 2011: 131–238). General works soon followed on the nature and mechanisms of the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing, mostly defined as the forced expulsion of an ethnically defined group of people from one state (or region) to another (Bell-Fialkoff 1996; Naimark 2001; Pégorier 2013; Ther 2014a).
